Forgot To Post This Here Sorry :))

@dimiclaudeblaigan asked for a tutorial on how to begin drawing. Good news! If you can draw a funky looking stick man, you have already started!

I think that stick people are a great starting point for artists because of the things you can learn from them that will be important later on.

If you are able to draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can easily put together a stick person.

Congratulations! You have started to draw. :)

A stick person is a very minimal artistic representation of a real life person. It is simple yet recognizable, and is widely used in art, media, and signage.

But what can a stick person teach us about drawing people that look more like… well, people? Lets have a look!

By simply adding a few more lines, we can add a pair of eyes and a mouth. Maybe even a little triangle nose! Or half circles for ears. We can now draw a face, which provides a basis for all sorts of expressions.

These simple additions can allow us to explore the wide range of human emotion and individuality.

This may seem like the basics of the basics. But that is what we want! In order to get to the point where we are able to draw complex, elaborate representations of humans and objects, we will need to start with simple shapes like lines and circles and build our understanding from there.

For instance, lets give our stick person some cool new features, such as hands and feet. I chose little squiggly circles to represent hands, and triangles to represent feet.

We can go a step further and modify the body of the stick person to include shoulders, hips, elbows and knees. These parts of the human body are quite complex in real life But here, all we need to do is add a few simple lines and dots to our stick person.

The lines provide some additional structural elements to our stick person's body, which are the shoulders and the hips. The dots indicate the points of articulation - elbows and knees, the places where the arms and legs bend!

Now we can use our stick person to show us an even wider range of human movement, action, and expression.

Our little drawing of a human being is evolving! All it took was adding a few more lines and shapes here and there.

By elongating some of the existing lines and making the head an oval instead of a circle, we can give our stick person proportions that resemble that of a real life human.

By this point, we have managed to add more complexity to our stick person simply by using our ability to draw lines, circles, and other basic shapes!

These basic ideas are the building blocks that will enable us to create more complex shapes.

The next part may be a considerable step up if you are absolutely new to drawing, but I have decided to include it in order to show you how complex objects like the human body can be built from shapes that are a bit more complex than circles and lines.

For example. Two ovals and a rectangle can be combined to create a cylinder.

Six squares can be combined to create a cube, or a box. Here, each square is distorted slightly depending on which way the cube is facing.

Note that the back faces of the cube and the bottom of the cylinder are hidden. These shapes allow us to visualize that which should not normally visible.

A sphere from all perspectives can be represented by a circle. But we can make it more like a sphere by adding lighting and shadow if we so desire.

Cubes, cylinders, and spheres are examples of 'solid shapes' because they consist of 3 dimensions.

Lets see how these solid shapes can be used to compose the human body.

By stacking three cylindrical objects, we can create a torso. Two spheres have been added to form shoulders, while a smaller cylinder forms the neck.

An arm is an alternating sequence of spheres and cylinders connected together. Note that the hand has been simplified for this example.

We can apply these solid shapes to the rest of the body to give us a more recognizable representation of the human form. It doesn't even have to be perfect. And just like that, our stick figure now has a silhouette that is unmistakably a person!

In the above examples, notice that we kept the stick person at the beginning while building up the shapes and solids around it. This is because the stick person serves as a guide for positioning the body and its various parts -> also known as posing.

You can do the same thing to everyday objects! Here, I drew a wine glass by stacking these three dimensional solid shapes.

The cup and its contents are two ovoid shapes that were cut in half. The stem is a very thin cylinder shape. The base is a cylinder with a slightly wider bottom.

Solid shapes help inform us how objects and parts of the human body may appear from different perspectives.

For example, a sphere can be used to demonstrate how the human head appears when looking up or down, turned to the side, or tilted at an angle.

With these examples, I hope I have managed to convinced you that if you can draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can draw a person! You just have to train your eye to recognize the simple shapes within complex objects. Try it with everyday objects as well! Or even your favourite media! A drawing subject can be as simple or as complex as you envision it to be.

Once you have mastered that, there are many aspects of drawing you can explore from here that may require you to seek additional resources or a fellow artist's advice.

Last of all, remember that drawing is an iterative process. Even if you draw something correct the first time, you will need to draw it again and again to get it right all times! And by making small changes like the ones we explored in this tutorial, your drawings will gradually transform!

I hope what I've demonstrated here are enough to provide the basics of how to get started with drawing objects and people, and also to help refresh more experienced artists. :) Hopefully I didn't go too off topic with what was requested, and let me know if there are any more questions I can answer.

Cheers :3

🙏😔Stop, please 😔🙏

Don't ignore me, listen to our sad story💔🥹🍉

My name is Kariman Dohan, I am 25 years old. I was a committed and diligent teacher, and my husband, Ayman Olwan, 30 years old, is a business administration graduate, but due to unemployment and difficult conditions in Gaza, he was forced to work as a fisherman. We have a wonderful son named Hamoud, who is one and a half years old. We live in Gaza, specifically Khan Yunis, where the fishing boat, fishing equipment and the school where I worked were damaged🥹🫂💔😭😭😭😭

We have been displaced several times, and our tragedy has reached the point that we now live in a tent that is unfit for living. We desperately need your help, I have launched a donation campaign but I cannot get the funds so I can get $50000 to get through this current crisis.

8482$********15.000$

gofundme.com

Donate to Save Kareman Dohan's Family from Despair, organized by Zenzi Zeme

I’m Zenzi and have made this GoFundMe for my friend in Palestine and her family. H… Zenzi Zeme needs your support for Save Kareman Dohan's F

Before the war and after the war, this is what happened to us😔💔

................

I know that the world is full of people who want to help others, and you are one of them. Please be with us in this ordeal and share your donation to help us get out of these difficult situations🫂🥹🥹🙏🙏🍉

Donate, share and be the reason for our happiness 🙏❤️🫂🥹🍉😭🇵🇸💔😣

gofundme.com

Donate to Save Kareman Dohan's Family from Despair, organized by Zenzi Zeme

I’m Zenzi and have made this GoFundMe for my friend in Palestine and her family. H… Zenzi Zeme needs your support for Save Kareman Dohan's F

The miniscule kiss on Ruby's nose...

Wanted to draw this scene with a touch of whiterose <3

"Stop inhaling your girlfriend"

sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

reposting my butch ruby with a bonus butchfemme WR :P

for everyone asking me "what do we do??!??!"

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DIY HRT Wiki 

The Innocence Project - helps take inmates off of death row

Food Not Bombs 

Transfeminine Science - collection of articles and data about transfem HRT

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Mass Defense Program - National Lawyers Guild

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Mask Bloc NJ (find one near you, these are international!)

Long Covid Justice

Donate to Palestinian campaigns (2, 3, 4)

Donate to Congolese campaigns (2, 3) 

Donate to Sudanese campaigns (2, 3)

You will be missed Osiria. Thank you for this last piece of beauty.

Reblog if you would love someone with

Depression

Anxiety

Suicidal thoughts

Scars

Self hate

Body mobifications (piercings, tattoos, etc)

Eating disorder

PTSD

OCD

Personality disorder(s)

Or anything else that society sees as “bad” or “unworthy of love” because everybody matters and needs love

(Read on our blog)

Beginning in 1933, the Nazis burned books to erase the ideas they feared—works of literature, politics, philosophy, criticism; works by Jewish and leftist authors, and research from the Institute for Sexual Science, which documented and affirmed queer and trans identities.

(Nazis collect "anti-German" books to be destroyed at a Berlin book-burning on May 10, 1933 (Source)

Stories tell truths.

These weren’t just books; they were lifelines.

Writing by, for, and about marginalized people isn’t just about representation, but survival. Writing has always been an incredibly powerful tool—perhaps the most resilient form of resistance, as fascism seeks to disconnect people from knowledge, empathy, history, and finally each other. Empathy is one of the most valuable resources we have, and in the darkest times writers armed with nothing but words have exposed injustice, changed culture, and kept their communities connected.

(A Nazi student and a member of the SA raid the Institute for Sexual Science's library in Berlin, May 6, 1933. Source)

Less than two weeks after the US presidential inauguration, the nightmare of Project 2025 is starting to unfold. What these proposals will mean for creative freedom and freedom of expression is uncertain, but the intent is clear. A chilling effect on subjects that writers engage with every day—queer narratives, racial justice, and critiques of power—is already manifest. The places where these works are published and shared may soon face increased pressure, censorship, and legal jeopardy.

And with speed-run fascism comes a rising tide of misinformation and hostility. The tech giants that facilitate writing, sharing, publishing, and communication—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the-hellscape-formerly-known-as-Twitter, Facebook, TikTok—have folded like paper in a light breeze. OpenAI, embroiled in lawsuits for training its models on stolen works, is now positioned as the AI of choice for the administration, bolstered by a $500 billion investment. And privacy-focused companies are showing a newfound willingness to align with a polarizing administration, chilling news for writers who rely on digital privacy to protect their work and sources; even their personal safety.

Where does that leave writers?

Writing communities have always been a creative refuge, but they’re more than that now—they are a means of continuity. The information landscape is shifting rapidly, so staying informed on legal and political developments will be essential for protecting creative freedom and pushing back against censorship wherever possible. Direct your energy to the communities that need it, stay connected, check in on each other—and keep backup spaces in case platforms become unsafe.

We can’t stress this enough—support tools and platforms that prioritize creative freedom. The systems we rely on are being rewritten in real time, and the future of writing spaces depends on what we build now. We at Ellipsus will continue working to provide space for our community—one that protects and facilitates creative expression, not undermines it.

Above all—keep writing.

Keep imagining, keep documenting, keep sharing—keep connecting. Suppression thrives on silence, but words have survived every attempt at erasure.

- The Ellipsus team